Captain S Murray OBE MB MRCS LRCP

Ms diary (75pp), kept by a Captain in the RAMC from December 1918 February 1919 whilst he was attached as a medical observer to a British reconnaissance unit and recording the geography and topography of the regions surveyed during his journey from Mosul to Rawandiz (Iraq) and from this town into the Kurdistan hinterland with useful references to the tribes he encountered, the prevalent local diseases and the ravages caused by Turkish and Russian forces; also carbon ts copies of the survey findings (44pp), ms, lecture notes and a carbon copy of a ts essay on Babylon, both undated, his AB439 and an undated printed leaflet on Ancient Assyria.

Unrestricted

Stuart Murray was born in March 1880 and following his training as a physician and surgeon he obtained a temporary commission as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in December 1914. After two and a half months' home-based service he was posted to the BEF where he remained until September 1917, receiving his promotion to Captain in December 1915. In November 1917 he joined the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force and from March 1918 to March 1919 was attached to the 1st Indian Corps Headquarters in Baiji, Iraq. It was during this period of his career that he took part in several reconnaissance expeditions, his duties being to record the medical problems prevalent in the regions surveyed and the diary with the collection relates to the first three of those journeys. In 1919 Captain Murray was awarded the OBE and demobilized; for the next twenty years he lived and worked in England, latterly as a limb-fitting surgeon for the Ministry of Pensions at Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton.